


No Man's Land

by solipsist



Category: Outlast (Video Games)
Genre: AU, M/M, Weird
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-24
Updated: 2019-06-24
Packaged: 2020-05-19 05:36:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19350556
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/solipsist/pseuds/solipsist
Summary: Waylon had never understood anyone who claimed to be totally out of touch with the progress of time before he had woken up to discover four years had passed without his knowledge. Life had withered and turned grey, and despite the very tame state of mind Waylon had, every minuscule detail was totally out of his control.





	1. Chapter 1

Waylon has shown up totally stoned. 

Jeremy is on the verge of tears when they’re lead through the restaurant. The reservations had been made only hours before in a taxi, with panic so great that he nearly tore the Zagat in two. But the table is good and Waylon is quiet, so Jeremy calms down and is amused at the sight of Waylon struggling to stay awake through his Lithium induced haze. 

Things otherwise seem to be going smoothly, and even if they had been given complimentary Bellinis, Waylon slurs out he wants a beer and Jeremy orders a Diet Coke to get some caffeine back into him and a Columbian wine.

“You know I got a… an email from Upshur’s family or something today,” Waylon says with each word spaced out. He’s staring past Jeremy’s shoulder, staring directly into a daydream. 

Nothing further is said and they both descend into a scary silence.   
Dim background noise quickens the creeping sensation that they had been sitting in the restaurant for a week. 

Waylon tries again, “Upshur’s girlfriend… I think she wants to talk… just talk a bit about what we… about where he… you know.” He shrugs helplessly, now delivering a glare so total that it automatically humbles Jeremy into looking away, although he can’t really be sure if Waylon is glaring at him or at the Diet Coke in disapproval. 

Waylon doesn’t hear a thing, he’s recalling a newspaper article he read that morning before chewing down Lithium tablets: animal rights activist slashes open the face of a mink coat wearing woman. ALF won't take credit. Be on the lookout and be careful if you’re wearing… self defense tips…

The energy exerted to read the menu sends Waylon into sleep. Jeremy very seriously considers leaving him stranded. 

Uselessly, Jeremy props Waylon against the table and looks at the speck of blood underneath his fingernails. There are framed photos on the wall, two teenagers in tuxedos, neither one of them smiling. An older man next to stuffed game heads and there’s something the matter with his eyes. He smiles emptily at a worried couple next to them and wonders if they’ve noticed his own impending anxiety attack. 

Jeremy stares at Waylon, who is now beginning to stir. A cold wave of fright washes over him, dousing something else. He tries to think of something with a purpose, something to guide him through the meandering nonsense that pounded at his head. But nothing comes except two white plates and Jeremy shakes Waylon back awake. 

Where there was water and life and beauty born, Jeremy can only see a desert so unyielding that it resembles a crater burning away at the dirt. It does not occur to him, ever, that it would be possible for anyone to change and for the idea of love to take root and spread over the earth like some kind of poisonous spore. The philosophy of treating others with kindness and how it would one day all come back to him was a bad joke and applied to nothing at all. 

Sitting there, in the restaurant with Waylon, he comes to the conclusion that some people do not need to be alive. The theory that every life, every person was meaningful and was an important part of keeping the world around him running was bull. And even more, he was one of those kinds of people. And if he were to slip into a crack, never to be seen again, everyone who had known him might breathe a sigh of relief. 

Jeremy has not touched his food, and as if the film sped up, Waylon is now talking and animated, mashing cornbread with his fork, alert over nothing.

“Have you… seen The Keepers?”

“Hm? No.”

Jeremy pauses, before going on.  
“It’s about… a nun who was murdered.”

If Waylon was sober, he would have quailed underneath his gaze.

“It’s very good.”

The small voice asks: Why not end up with Waylon?

Once, a psychiatrist he had been seeing for two months said it was never really too late for anyone and this scares Jeremy. 

“I’m going to go… get water. I think. I’m seeing red and it’s making me anxious,” Waylon says meaninglessly.

After thirty minutes, Waylon has fallen asleep in the coatroom.   
Jeremy vomits up his squid in the bathrooms, undigested and more purple than it had been on the plate.

A rat crawls out from the stall next to him, massive and with a tail as long as a pencil and twice as thick. Although the initial impact of his foot isn’t enough to quickly kill it, the neck audibly crunches and leaves it squealing on the floor in its own slime. 

“Sorry I took so long,” Jeremy lies to Waylon, “I had to call my lawyer.”

Buildings whizz past the taxi, a blur of grey and red.


	2. Chapter 2

The new black cordless phone rings. Waylon closes the textbook he’s been ineffectively highlighting for the past hour and listens to Anthony, his lawyer, on the other end. 

Then Waylon says, “The bill is three hundred dollars, Anthony. We only had coffee.”  
A long pause, during which Waylon remembers he hasn’t eaten all day and he begins to sift through a bag of ground coffee with a label written: Camano Island Coffee Roasters, which Jeremy says is organic and good for them. 

“But yes… wait… but I am -- we only had expresso…”

He is then peering into the refrigerator. 

Someone’s head stares back at him, gender unidentifiable from mutilated features. It’s wrapped in a plastic bag, still fresh and untouched from rigor mortis. The eyes have been scooped out, something like barbed wire is strung tightly around what remained of the neck, and an ear has been bitten off. 

But Waylon is on a lot of Halcion and this doesn’t bother him as much as it should because at the very least, it’s not touching anything and if Waylon remembered correctly, one could only get diseases from corpses by eating the rotten flesh and maybe the brains. 

“I understand, but…” 

The Asian pears are four dollars apiece at the outdoor market they frequent. Waylon can only eat half of it before dropping the rest down the sink and flicking on the disposal. 

Waylon is thinking of other things: error messages that come up when he presses return, the numbness that settles in the front of his skull after working for too long, department mergers, meetings with lawyers, the stench of rotting meat hitting him in the face, credit cards and someone’s passport to Cuba, never hungry and never tired, the proper way to sit in front of a computer and tips to avoid tendonitis, the planning Jeremy took to make sure he saw nothing but death and gore upon arriving home to Lisa and the boys, how Eddie touched his face so softly, the noise organs made when dropping on the floor, blue and purple and green lights in dark clubs at midnight and True Faith pounding in the main room while he’s in the stalls taking coke with nameless strangers, Jeremy sees their relationship as shades of pink and red and blue and yellow but to Waylon it’s nothing but grey and bombed and blacked out footage, and nothing quite touches his heart like it used to.

It’s an isolation ward that only serves to twist open his own disconnect and apathy. He is at the center and everyone stares back at him in total silence. 

Waylon had never understood anyone who claimed to be totally out of touch with the progress of time before he had woken up to discover four years had passed without his knowledge. Life had withered and turned grey, and despite the very tame state of mind Waylon had, every minuscule detail was totally out of his control.

Holding his breath seemed to fill the constant, devouring hole in his chest for a moment. Pushing against the routine that had set into stone proved paralyzing. Words lost weight and meaning, his purpose was nothing more than a vague concept, and once Waylon had found himself tearfully emailing a priest that he had not attended church since he was twenty and that one time he had gotten married, and his life had gone to shit, did God hate him?

How many times would Waylon come to terms with Eddie's sudden death? With the stench of rotting flesh, how blood that spelt out TRAITOR on his kitchen walls still dripped and shone in the evening's air? How many times would he have to close his eyes and envision kicking dogs, poisoning patients and throwing nurses out of windows for no reason aside from sheer hatred? And if the idea of loneliness was terrifying, it only made Jeremy’s hand on his lap so much worse. 

He has an anxiety attack hours later and Jeremy offers him a glass of wine. 

Upon drinking it, the universe explodes into hundreds upon hundreds of little shards of ceramic blue tiles and Waylon wakes up six hours later alone in bed with the lights off.


	3. Chapter 3

For a limited period of time, Jeremy has found himself capable of willingly interacting with the girlfriend called Tiffany, who thinks they’re in love, and her endless gaggle of friends and friends of friends. 

Tonight, it’s an infuriating dinner with her and a vaguely ditzed out cousin who asks about the merits of Vietmese pot-bellied pigs as pets, the David Hockney (or Onica?) exhibit opening in May, spa menus, and other topics straight from the stuff of nightmares. And Tiffany only entertains her. Their voices now are at a particular pitch which cannot be ignored, forcing Jeremy to give up trying to figure out which he would like to fuck more, and to instead press a palm to his ears in some miserable effort to fight back against the senseless, droning noise. 

In the muffled silence, he recalls the psychiatrist he had been seeing for the past two months and how he asked what Tiffany’s preferred sexual act was. In complete seriousness, Jeremy replied, “Foreclosure.” 

“Anyways, the most amusing thing happened,” Jeremy is sharply aware that if he were not sitting in a restaurant, he would had shoved forks deep into both of their eyes, “Jeremy are you listening?” And maybe in some different universe, he would break into the cousin’s condo and mace her face until she could no longer see and maybe hack her to pieces. 

“I am,” he replies vacantly, staring into Tiffany’s eyes. He’s phased out now, and doesn’t do the thing with the forks and the mace and the hacking, and instead orders a glass of something vaguely French sounding but too cheap to really be French. 

“Isn’t that amusing,” casually laughing along with the cousin and with her, the sounds coming out of his mouth are filled with empty scorn.

Jeremy is thinking to himself: Do you think I’m crazy? When he asked Waylon last night, it was clear that Waylon chose his next words with extreme caution. I think… you can be a little unusual… but it’s probably due to stress from managing… Mount Massive… and! And all the stuff that’s happened recently… uh, it’s only natural you’d lash out in… unexpected ways. But you can’t control it or anything, and there’s nothing wrong with -- It was a very nice thought and Jeremy told Waylon he was good. 

The minutes tick by.

They all order.

The cousin is progressively more and more obviously stoned and Jeremy reflects on how drugged out idiots seem to be a recurring event in his life and whether or not he should begin providing drug treatment programs and furthermore if he should pump Waylon full of Ritalin to keep him awake for more than three hours at a time, even if the official statement said Waylon Park was a paranoid schizophrenic. 

The food arrives. 

The waiter insists on hanging around their table with a pepper shaker, asking at five minute intervals, “More pepper? More pepper?” and Jeremy sends him away for a glass of water and flags down the maitre d’ to tell him that if the fool came slithering around their table, offering pepper once more, Jeremy would jump on him and slice his mouth open from one end to the other. They had not ordered anything that needed pepper. They did not need, they did not want pepper, no pepper, tell him to get lost. 

Embarrassed, Tiffany asks if he must be so polite. 

Jeremy breathes in sharply. 

“Must you constantly undermine my stability?”

“Let’s have a conversation,” Tiffany whines, “not an interrogation.” 

The cousin is utterly fascinated with her food, probably unaware she was permitted to eat. Jeremy finally decides that although both the cousin and Tiffany were both very stupid, and even if Tiffany had the nicer body, he would prefer to fuck the cousin who would never notice the things he could do to her with a wire coat hanger. 

“About what?”

“I don’t know,” she snaps. Tiffany stops herself, as if remembering something, but goes on, “I still have keys to Madison’s beach house, and you haven’t told me if you’re coming with me over Memorial weekend.”

Jeremy cannot mollify her anger. After a pause: “I guess.”

The cousin takes a separate taxi and has probably woken up in some dimly lit downtown section where the smoke shops have bars on them and the windows to Korean delis are covered in neon pink and green words and prices and grime, far away from home and too hungover to even think of a plan beyond sitting on a park bench.   
Jeremy is grinning viciously throughout his taxi ride back to Tiffany’s brownstone when he imagines this. 

For dessert, Jeremy prepared something special.

A patient had been forcibly quarantined and all staff interaction was highly suggested they wear hazmat suits (nothing better was on hand at such short notice) as the patient was recently diagnosed with HIV and had taken up biting his tongue open and spitting infected blood into the faces of those he couldn’t stand. 

Jeremy obtained the blood sample after a power breakfast and drizzled it over a slice of New York white chocolate cheesecake he purchased at La Colombe that morning. 

Jeremy even manages to impress himself when he brings it out from the fridge and presents it to Tiffany with flair, “Voi - la!”  
She makes a move for the spoon he’s placed next to her and coos, “Jeremy, that’s so sweet.” 

She hovers almost anxiously over the blood covered cheesecake, “I adore raspberries.”

Tiffany leans down and sniffs, catching a whiff of something (possibly metallic) and asks him again, “Are you going to have any?”

“No… sweetheart,” Jeremy says, choking up at the pet name, “there’s not a lot there. I bought it for you.”

She takes the first bite, chews slowly, immediately and obviously disgusted, but swallows much to Jeremy’s relief. Tiffany tries to offer him a smile as she takes another tentative bite. 

“What? It’s not poisoned or anything.”

“No, no, it’s so… strange.”

Tiffany’s face is one long atagnozied grimace. Jeremy no longer cares if she continues eating, but goads her on anyways, “What? What is it?”

“I mean, the cake itself is just - … divine, but the… the raspberry sauce is so…”   
She searches her brain for words, before struggling out, “canned…?”

Again, Tiffany forces a smile and pushes away the tainted plate. At that, Jeremy began to feel very sad. Suddenly, it seems, he was reminded that although she was most definitely incurably diseased, it was all at his expense. Jeremy’s jaw begins to clench and relax involuntarily, and he wonders if he could had made Waylon lick it all up from the plate with despite the knowledge it was human blood.

Then the evening comes to its horrid climax.

“When will you propose to me? It’s been three years.”

Jeremy, along with the date, has already deteriorated considerably, and the question - or rather, the intent behind her words - came as no shock. His endurance is melting as quickly as the frozen cheesecake was and the choking sensation knots up in his throat once again.

What Jeremy knew he once held as attractive was gone.   
Her complete, total emptiness inside - her unawareness of a world full of very real problems and people was simply no longer enjoyable. It horrified Jeremy more than ever. With each passing day, he realizes he’s no longer fucking a human but an automation who would never make a difference because, much like Jeremy, Tiffany was simply not there. And although he detested the idea of having anything in common with the girlfriend who thought they were in love, the more Jeremy thought about it, the more he failed to highlight any significant differences between himself and Tiffany. 

“My life is a living hell,” Jeremy says, staring at Tiffany, “and there are some people I’d like to, uh, murder.”

He starts. He stalls. He starts again. 

“We’ve lost… We never really had a connection.”

“What do you mean,” Tiffany mindlessly asks as she checks her lipstick in her baby blue compact mirror.

“I don’t feel anything for you. Or anyone, really. And, um… I think because of my total detachment…? Detachment from everyone, I have a drive that makes - me - need - to…”

Jeremy stumbles and flails from his words, more shocked at how emotional this carathis makes him than it makes Tiffany, who isn’t paying attention to what he’s saying anymore and probably trying to list off brands that taste tinny to correct Jeremy on his future attempts at cooking. 

“I think I’m losing it,” he says finally, “or maybe I never had it. And I have needs that nobody can really fulfill for me. When I engage in those behaviors…” 

Very sullenly, a shred of empathy panging in his chest for all the times Waylon had tried to speak to him only to be ignored, Jeremy quietly mumbles, “We need to talk.”

“Jeremy, if you start on again about why I should have breast implants, you're going straight out of the door.

He considers this. 

Then, “It’s over.”

Tiffany looks at him, finally. For a moment, it seems there’s someone behind glassy eyes that is trying to comprehend the gravity of the situation that Jeremy has placed them in.

But the sentience dissolves just as quickly, and her mouth opens to say that she’s sorry and they should just book another appointment with the psychiatrist Jeremy has been seeing for the past two months and she’s just been so horribly anxious and out of it and her neighbor was decapitated recently and even her massuse has noticed she’s been tense recently, maybe she’s stressed, maybe he’s stressed, and they can just go to Madison's beach house to relax and talk things over and sometimes marriage just isn’t for

This all falls totally flat against Jeremy. 

“It’s all over, Tiffany. It’s - fucking - over. This has got to end. I can’t do this - I can’t do you anymore. You’re totally fucking crazy.”

“Oh God. God, you’re really serious.”

“Dead fucking serious.”

Her shoulders are moving in tune with deep, heavy breaths that precede a fit of tears. Jeremy closes his eyes sharply, his hand moving to his side and gripping his thigh, steeling himself for the outcome of her realization. 

“What is it you want from me?”

Wordlessly, Jeremy’s tongue moves against his teeth, nothing.

He stands up, assessing the situation and realizing it was a totally lost cause. 

“What about our past?”

“We never… really had one to begin with.”

“Our future! We can still -”

“I don’t want one.”

“Where are you going?”

Her hands lunge out, grabbing for his own hands - to which Jeremy slaps her away for.

Holding his breath in for a few precious seconds, Jeremy wonders about the possibility of his skin being unzipped to show no blood, no bones, no muscle - but absolute nothingness. The horrible vacantness that hounds his very being had not only simply consumed his attachment to others and sense of humanity, but his insides as well before eventually exploding and devouring his outer appearances as well. 

He’s been facing the door, hand on knob for much longer than appropriate. 

“I don’t know.”

“You have to be going somewhere!”

Jeremy is lost in his own private maze. Some day, perhaps months from now, she’ll call him from a hospital and tearfully beg that they at least talk things out. She’s dying. She wants closure for the only person she’s ever been able to love. There was a stark difference between the cousin that showed up high and when Waylon does it, but Jeremy cannot put his finger on why Waylon was more pleasing than the embarrassment of the other. 

“I’m going to get your dog out of my freezer and thaw it overnight. I’ll make it into lunchmeat and give the bums downtown sandwiches.”

Tiffany screams that he must be autistic for thinking that this was at all the right time to make a joke.


End file.
